Dr Rachael Weaver awarded Hugh Williamson Foundation Fellowship

Two Hugh Williamson Foundation fellowships have been awarded to support research using archival collections to Dr Rachael Weaver for her project ‘Literary Influence, Canonicity and the Historical in the Career of William Gosse Hay’ and Mr Alister Sluiter for his project ‘Digital Reconstruction of the lost Gothic Architecture of the University of Melbourne’.

Rachael Weaver is an Australia Research Council Research Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at The Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne, contributing to a three year project exploring character types in colonial Australian literature. Her project at Archives will be focussed on William Gosse Hay (1875-1945).

Hay was relatively unknown in Australia in his lifetime, but just after his death in 1946 in a special edition of Southerly the journal’s editor, RG Howarth, noted that ‘Hay anticipates and touches the moderns’ and compares him to writers such as Patrick White and Eleanor Dark. The originality and significance of this project lies in its excavation of new insights into Hay’s career and the way it has been understood over time.

Image: William Gosse Hay with pet magpie at 'Nangawooka', Hindmarsh Valley Approximately 1925, Hammer & Co, State Library of South Australia B 71835